V'Ming - who thinks that gnome warlocks are travesties of nature and need to be KOSed - shares thoughts and ideas on becoming deadlier at the Arenas. He also dabbles in the dark arts in Blood Pact.
Looking at some of the upcoming class changes in patch 2.4, I can't help but feel that many of them are driven by PvP - particularly Arena - issues. Blizzard is undoubtedly trying to level the playing field for the classes before the 3v3 Arena Tournament, tentatively set to begin in April. That's a very short time to iron out problems and further imbalances that the patch will bring.
A design philosophy that Blizzard has insisted on from the beginning is that each class should play similarly in both PvP and PvP. Tom Chilton (Lead Designer, or Kalgan) said at last year's Blizzcon that the game "shouldn't have significantly different rules for spells in PvP vs PvE."
"Slower" water in Arenas is the latest change that depart from this philosophy, in addition to PvP-only diminishing returns, and PvP-oriented stats like Resilience and Spell Penetration. However, since many class changes apply to both PvP and PvE, PvE players seem to be "dragged" along by changes meant to tune their classes' PvP performance. Shamans and druids seem to be most affected this patch with changes to Nature's Swiftness, Elemental Mastery, Call of Thunder for shamans, and Lifebloom for druids.
This afternoon gaming luminaries Rob Pardo (Blizzard), Min Kim (Nexon), Ray Muzyka (Bioware), Jack Emmert (Cryptic), and Matt Miller (NCsoft) got together at GDC to exchange their thoughts on the future of the industry. Sister site Massively was there live, no doubt typing furiously in order to catch every crumb of information. Want to know what's going to happen to your favorite game (or games!) in 10 or 20 years? Check out Massively's live coverage.
Rob Pardo, Blizzard's Senior Vice President of Game Design, is speaking at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this afternoon and WoW Insider is here live to catch it all. Though the auditorium is just filling up, Pardo should be out in a few minutes to tell us all about Blizzard's approach to multiplayer game design. Catch the full details after the break.
Well, even if Blizzard as a whole doesn't, Rob Pardo certainly seems to. At the Hollywood & Games Summit, when asked about canceling projects, Pardo responded with his thoughts on Blizzard's ill-fated Starcraft Ghost:
Our most recent one was Starcraft Ghost. With that game we were very stubborn. I still believe in that game and the characters but we were not able to execute at the level we wanted to...Rather than work on that we had to focus on our other games. We're hoping one day to return to it.
So March 2006's indefinite postponement of development on the project may not mean cancellation -- perhaps they're just saving the best for last.
Even if you don't know the name, you're familiar with Rob Pardo's work. He is, after all, the Vice President of Design over at Blizzard, and he's responsible for the game design decisions you see whenever you venture into the World of Warcraft. Next Generation sat down with Rob Pardo to ask some of of everyone's burning questions on the future of World of Warcraft. First up, what exactly does a VP of Design do? Pardo explains: With the teams as big as they are I don't get as much time to write design documents myself. There's a lot more meetings, a lot more collaborative stuff that happens. Let's take one small component of WoW, let's say quests. We have a team of quest designers and we all sit in a room everyday and jam up ideas. I'll follow up with each individual quest designer. I'll play their quests and iterate through it. But there's some stuff I get to design too. I also try to fill gaps that need filling. I'm trying to provide the big picture vision and philosophy and also helping out where it's needed.
Pardo is happy with the way the Burning Crusade has turned out. But what about the future? Are regular expansions a matter of survival for Blizzard's hit MMO? Calling it a matter of survival makes it sound grim. It's more a matter of entertainment. Of course we want our gamers to stay in the world for as long as we can. But I look at this from the positive angle of us trying to entertain them. We're trying to give them new experiences. One of my favorite analogies is how much an MMO is like a TV series. We're developing episodes just like Lost or Seinfeld. We're always trying to come up with something that's true to the theory; that's true to the content that people love; but that is new. From the moment that the series starts re-treading the same ground over and over again... well, that's what we're trying to avoid.
I've got to admit, parts of this Hollywood Reporter interview feels like a rehash of Pardo's keynote at the Austin Game Conference back in September. New and interesting tidbits include an officially increased subscription count at 8 million worldwide and an interesting discussion of microtransactions. Pardo tells us that while such microtransactions might work for some games (he uses the possibility of extra songs in Guitar Hero as an example), it doesn't work for MMO's, or at least not World of Warcraft:
What's fun about "WoW' is going into a dungeon and completing a particular quest and then being rewarded with a really cool item that your character can wear to show the other players that you've accomplished something. If you could suddenly buy that item, it would really cheapen that idea of accomplishment.
Haven't heard of Rob Pardo? Well, you might want to familiarize yourself with him. Not only is he Blizzard's Vice President of Game Development, but he recently was put on Time Magazine's list of the top 100 people, which points out that Pardo didn't invent the MMO - he just perfected it.
So Wednesday morning, when the Austin Game Conference started out with a keynote from Mr. Pardo on the game design philosophy behind World of Warcraft it wasn't to be missed. Read on for the highlights of the keynote.
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